PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou is devoting an in-depth retrospective to the work and career of the painter Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982), from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The exhibition aims to reposition the Cuban artist’s work within an international history of modern art, to which he made a key contribution in both Europe and the Americas.

An extensive exhibition
Through more than 400 works (paintings, drawings, photographs, reviews and rare books), the exhibition offers a renewed and chronological journey through the artist’s work: Spain, 1923-1938; Paris-Marseille, 1938-1941, Cuba and the Americas, 1941-1952, Paris, Caracas, Havana, Albissola, Zurich, 1952-1961, Paris and Albissola, 1962-1982. The retrospective features an outstanding loan from the MoMA in New York: La Jungla, 1943, one of the artist’s landmark works.

A look back over all the periods of Lam’s singular career
From his early years in Cuba, and the time he spent in Spain from 1924-1938 (many works from this period were later found in Madrid), to the dazzling series of engravings in the Sixties and Seventies, the exhibition sheds new light on his major works after his «return to the homeland» (1942 -1952), in the cultural and political context of the period.

An international travelling exhibition
After the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition will be presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, from 12 April to 15 August 2016, then at the Tate Modern, London, from 14 September 2016 to 8 January 2017.

An essential work of reference
The event is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue published by the Centre Pompidou, edited by the exhibition curator, Catherine David.

This features new articles by Kobena Mercer, Mathew Gale and Catherine David, and an anthology including texts by Michel Leiris, Pierre Mabille, Fernando Ortiz, Alain Jouffroy and Lowery Stokes Sims.

The exhibition is organized in five chronological sequences corresponding to phases in the artist’s career, each bearing the stamp of the places and the poets and thinkers he frequented at the time:

• SPAIN 1923-1938
• PARIS, MARSEILLE 1938-1941
• CUBA AND THE AMERICAS, 1941-1952
• PARIS, CARACAS, HAVANA, ALBISSOLA & ZURICH, 1952-1961
• PARIS AND ALBISSOLA,1962-1982

SPAIN 1923-1938
The 1920s saw Wifredo Lam progressively free himself from the academic approach he was taught in Havana and at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid, where he enrolled in 1923. At first classical in inspiration, his works were profoundly influenced by his study of the old masters he encountered at the Prado. Gradually taking his distance from this tradition, he sought inspiration in the example of the avant-gardes, from Gauguin to the German Expressionists, and above all in Gris, Miró, Picasso and Matisse, whom he discovered in 1929. Under their influence he simplified his forms, abandoned effects of perspective and laid down areas of flat colour on broad expanses of paper, which became his favoured support. Sensitive to economic and social inequalities that recalled those of the land of his birth, he was attracted to the figure of the Spanish peasant, and in 1932, following the death of his wife and son from tuberculosis, he enlisted in the Republican cause. His Spanish works offer poignant testimony to this period of apprenticeship, poverty, and struggle, which came to an end in 1938, when the victory of the Franquist forces prompted a hurried departure for Paris.

PARIS, MARSEILLE 1938-1941
Arriving in the French capital, Paris, Lam was struck by the influence on European art of the African sculpture celebrated by the avant-gardes that he frequented. His faces became simplified into geometric masks, this expressionist violence reflecting the inner crisis provoked by exile and the recent loss of his wife and child. Here the influence of the Romanesque and of the art of the Cyclades and Ancient Egypt combined with the impact of Late Cubism and his encounter with the African art he discovered at the Musée de l’Homme and at the studio of Picasso, who quickly became a friend and mentor. In 1940, faced with the entry of German troops into Paris, he escaped to Marseille, where he joined Breton and the Surrealists. Lam reacted to the prevailing unease by participating in the creation of joint works – “exquisite corpses” and suchlike automatic productions. He filled small sketchbooks with ink drawings of hybrid figures, both erotic and monstrous, which testify to the formal and psychic freedom to which he aspired.

CUBA AND THE AMERICAS, 1941-1952
After 18 years in Europe and two forced exiles, Lam landed in Martinique in the company of André Breton and other friends. There he met Aimé Césaire, the poet of négritude, who shared in the same rejection of relationships of racial and cultural domination, a rejection fortified in Lam by his own engagement in struggle and his Marxist reading. He found his return to Cuba painful, being struck by the endemic corruption, racism and poverty of an island whose native culture seemed to survive as no more than a folklorical fakery that he despised. Lam thus turned to the production of works peopled by syncretic figures combining animal, vegetal and human that articulated the distinctive energy and spirituality of Caribbean culture. He was guided in his quest for “Cubanness” by ethnologists Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz and by the writer Alejo Carpentier, explorers of the complex traditions, aesthetics and history of Afro-Cuban culture.

PARIS, CARACAS, HAVANA, ALBISSOLA & ZURICH, 1952-1961
This was a period that saw Lam’s many travels frequently take him away from the studio. Forms are simplified and paintings organised by internal rhythm. In 1952, Lam left Cuba to settle once again in Paris. He began to exhibit more frequently abroad, notably alongside the CoBrA artists whom he met through his friend Asger Jorn. Their spontaneity, taste for collective work and interest in popular art brought him into contact with new materials, such as terra cotta, and prompted experiment with new forms. In the Brousse series of 1958 he appropriated the energy of American gestural abstraction in a radical simplification of the luxuriantly vegetal compositions of the 1940s. His simultaneously dreamlike and incisive drawings illustrated many works by the poets and writers among his friends, among them René Char and Gherasim Luca.

PARIS AND ALBISSOLA,1962-1982
It was in 1954, invited by Asger Jorn, that Lam discovered the Italian light of Albissola, an important centre of ceramic production. In 1962 he moved there, the town remaining his main base for the rest of his life. He expanded his collection of non-Western art, displayed in his studio, testimony to the multiplicity of his sources of inspiration. Attracted by the spontaneous freedom that came with working in terra cotta and by the chance that intervened in the creative process “with the length and intensity of firing, the interaction and transformation of colours”, he would produce almost 300 ceramics in 1975, their symbolism derived from his painting and drawing. These years were again marked by travel – to Egypt, India, Thailand, Mexico – and by growing institutional recognition; they were occupied too with the composition of the autobiographical Le nouveau Nouveau Monde de Lam, which offers a comprehensive mapping of his poetical and geo-political affinities. A tireless worker, Lam died in 1982, upon completing, at home, the engravings for L’Herbe sous les pavés, his last artist’s book, on a text by Jean-Dominique Rey.